Without Gerald Ivory, "Colors," the street-gang drama opening nationwide Friday, might have lacked much of its controversial punch. "Gerald has known the gangs when they were in the slammer and out of the slammer," said Robert Solo, producer of the film starring Robert Duvall and Sean Penn. "He really made a difference--he was the main person who made it possible for us to film in gang-dominated neighborhoods."

Without Gerald Ivory, "Colors," the street-gang drama opening nationwide Friday, might have lacked much of its controversial punch. "Gerald has known the gangs when they were in the slammer and out of the slammer," said Robert Solo, producer of the film starring Robert Duvall and Sean Penn. "He really made a difference--he was the main person who made it possible for us to film in gang-dominated neighborhoods."

A man's body was found stuffed inside a plastic bag in the bushes lining a Hollywood Freeway off-ramp, Los Angeles police said. Caltrans workers discovered the bag in plants along the Alvarado Street exit from the northbound freeway, said Lt. Rick Morton. The victim, believed to be a black man in his late 20s or early 30s, had not been identified. Detectives were awaiting an autopsy, Morton said.

December 16, 2001 | FRED DICKEY, Fred Dickey last wrote for the magazine about the criminal investivation of a San Diego wildlife activist

Through the plate glass separating prisoners from visitors, John Patrick Sheridan talks about the secret he kept for a decade. He explains how loyalty to a drinking buddy and a promise of $25,000 were enough for him to murder someone. He describes how he planned the killing and rehearsed it, and then pulled it off without a hitch. Yes, he says, he was lucky for a first-time hit man. Lucky, that is, except for one thing.

Orange County district attorney investigators watched the admitted killer of a strip-club owner collect $3,000 for the hit last year, then let him keep the money while he was working for them undercover, an investigator testified Monday. Lawyers for a suspect in the case were highly critical of the authorities' actions, saying they should have seized the cash, not let a suspected killer profit from murder.

In a crime-riddled pocket of southeast Los Angeles, where residents say wearily that they have seen it all, 13-year-old Shalonda Lewis stood on her mother's porch Wednesday and described the lethal firebombing. "After the shooting," the teen-ager said calmly, "we knew something was going to happen. It was just a question of what and when."

Los Angeles police detectives searching a camper in which a woman says she was enslaved for 14 months found weapons, chains and handcuffs Tuesday, while a second woman told authorities that she too was held captive, raped and beaten in the same vehicle. The camper was impounded after police on Monday evening arrested a man and two women who were living inside. All three were booked on suspicion of kidnaping. The man, identified as Robert A.

In the video movie "The Takeover," a bloody fight for control over nude clubs with names like Bare Elegance and The Jet Strip rages across Los Angeles, ending when the clubs' owner is murdered. That story line, authorities say, is strikingly similar to the crime with which the movie's executive producer and one of its co-stars were charged Monday.

A 12-year-old boy, out for his first night ever of trick-or-treating since immigrating to the United States, was shot in the leg when five suspected gang members tried to steal his $8 mask and Halloween candy, authorities said Thursday. Fernando Castillo Jr., whose family came from Nicaragua four years ago, was walking with his parents and five other youngsters Wednesday night when a group of teen-agers approached them on South Broadway near 42nd Street.

In the month since the Los Angeles riots, there have been no revenge killings involving the city's two most notorious street gangs, law enforcement officers in the Los Angeles area said Friday, lending credibility to a truce called by the two gangs in the wake of the riots.